Lenses

Resources for learning about lenses:

How lenses for glasses are made

Fascinating page on the Fresnel Lens (used in lighthouses) and we also loved this video showing how they work. Such an ingenious concept!

Here are some lenses we used for experimentation.

While discussing lenses, we used both our microscope (we have this one, which we got a couple years ago and have really loved) and our telescope (this one, which is quite new and we have hardly used it, so I can't say if it's a good one or not. The reviews say it's good for beginners, which we definitely are).

This is a great discussion of why things in a microscope get darker as the magnification increases (and why there is a limit to what we can see with optical microscopes!)

This page tells how lenses are used to make searchlights and car headlights brighter.

We liked these diagrams showing how different lenses can work together in a lens array. Since Sebastian is currently obsessed with digital cameras and how they work, this was particularly interesting to him, as was this page on SLR cameras. There's a cool interactive feature on that page where you can change ISO, aperture, shutter speed, etc. and see how those changes affect the photograph.